#lit

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real. ↗

— Philip K. Dick

#nihilism #philosophy #post-modernism #reality #truth

Not very good with death? Father was a military man, and military men lived with death; lived for death; lived on death. To a professional soldier, oddly enough, death was life. ↗

— Alan Bradley

#military #war #death

Don’t let yourself forget how many doctors have died, furrowing their brows over how many deathbeds. How many astrologers, after pompous forecasts about others’ ends. How many philosophers, after endless disquisitions on death and immortality. How many warriors, after inflicting thousands of casualties themselves. How many tyrants, after abusing the power of life and death atrociously, as if they were themselves immortal. How many whole cities have met their end: Helike, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and countless others. And all the ones you know yourself, one after another. One who laid out another for burial, and was buried himself, and then the man who buried him - all in the same short space of time. In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls. Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on. ↗

— Marcus Aurelius

#spirituality #death

Besides,love is only a feeling. ↗

— Christina Westover

#literary-quote #love #mainstream-fiction #poisoning-sylvie #psychology

When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters. ↗

— Alexis de Tocqueville

#political-economy #business

Life is like Facebook. People will like and coments your problems, but no one will solve them because they're busy updating them. ↗

— Lucy Hale

#pretty-little-liars #business

Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real. ↗

— Grant Morrison

#batman #children #comics #fiction #literature

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. ↗

— Eric Hoffer

#movements #philosophy #politics #business

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better. ↗

— Mark Twain

#morality #business

This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words. ↗

— Jennifer Egan

#music #reality #business